Dragon Empress

Chapter 31

Far below, Ashétyn’s fanged incisors gleamed in a terrible smile. She cackled at the sight of the dragon and dissolved into shadow.

“She’s coming for you, Fletch,” Roxanne warned him.

“We know. We can take her.”

She prayed that was true. Entropy had dampened Khyvette’s abilities more than anyone’s, and she’d been wielding non-stop for a week. Even a dragon mage would run out of energy eventually.

The shadowtroops must be counting on that. They wanted to wear her down.

By now, the closest sorcerers were twenty heights away. Roxanne fed more strands of energy into the ground. A misshapen blob of dirt rose beside her, wobbling in the air as she ran. The spell held for a few moments before crumbling to pieces. Her threads slipped from her grasp. Not entropy this time, simply exhaustion.

“You head back to the portal,” said Effrax. “If you can’t wield, you can’t fight.”

The sustained fighting had clearly addled his brain. No way was Roxanne turning back. She forged ahead of him, determined to reach the Moorfainians. She’d kill them with her bare hands if she had to.

“Retreat,” Effrax snapped. “That’s an order!”

She didn’t respond. Now that she was this close, she heard the Moorfainians chanting. Speaking the dragons’ language—which they’d bastardized for their own terrible use—their voices rose in a dissonant song. Each sorcerer gripped a long, silver blade.

“Fletcher, I need you and Khyvette here now,” she screamed to her ring. “The sorcerers are summoning!”

Too late. The chant crested in a piercing roar. As one, the sorcerers plunged their knives into the necks of their captives. Allentrian blood flowed around the wide circle, spilling forth.

“NO!” Roxanne reached the barrier, its curved edge marked by unnatural eddies of smoke. She slammed her fist against it in impotent rage. An electric jolt shot up her arm, sending black sparks flying from the impact.

A hand clamped down on her shoulder. Blinking away hot, angry tears, she turned to see Effrax. “I told you to retreat.”

“You’re not my commanding officer,” she retorted, though her heart wasn’t in the argument. Exhaustion and a crushing sense of failure had begun to sink into her. “Besides, it doesn’t matter. We’re too late.”

She looked up, scanning the air for Fletcher and Khyvette. They were nowhere to be seen, though admittedly, smoke obscured most of the western skies. Still, Fletcher hadn’t acknowledged her cry through the comms ring. That wasn’t like him.

“No sign of daemonion,” said Effrax. “What were these suckbloods doing, if not summoning more . . .”

He trailed off, and a numb, empty expression crept across his face. It made Roxanne’s blood run cold. Following his line of sight, she spotted two new figures in the center of the death circle. One was a tall Moorfainian with sallow skin and stringy black hair. He held a silver knife, brandishing it at the second, slightly shorter man.

A man she recognized.

Effrax raised a shaking hand. A flurry of obsidian sparks erupted beneath his fingers when he touched the barrier. He flinched but, rather than pulling back, pressed forward. He dug his hands into it, pushing hard enough to distort the crackling edges of the force field.

Veins stood out on his neck as he gritted his teeth against the pain and dug deeper. Horrified, Roxanne grabbed his arms to stop him. An unpleasant tingling current flooded into her when she yanked him away.

“Let go,” he grated, struggling against her grip. “I can break through!”

“You’ll shock yourself to death in the process,” she hissed. “Besides, he’s dangerous. You can’t kill him, not when we’re facing odds like this.”

With a great heave, Effrax wrenched one arm free of her hold. She reached for it again, but he whirled around, turning her momentum against her. Now he was the one in control, pinning her arms, forcing her to stare into his tormented face.

“I don’t want to kill him,” he rasped. “He’s my father.”

“He’s not,” Roxanne whispered. “Not anymore.”

She looked away from Effrax to stare at Salix Embersnag. In life, he’d been King of the Fironem; in death, he had been forced to become one of Necrovar’s Spiders, a creature with unparalleled necromagical powers.

The tall Moorfainian, the one whose knife rested at Embersnag’s throat, spoke. Already on high alert, Roxanne caught his words with her heightened senses:

“Are you ready to serve your Lord and Master?” the Moorfainian intoned.

“I am prepared to leave this world, so Necrovar may return to it,” Embersnag replied.

Perhaps Effrax had heard, or maybe he sensed something horrific was afoot. He released Roxanne and began shoving at the barrier again. An anguished cry tore from his throat:

“Father!”

Though Salix Embersnag’s eyes were solid spheres of darkness, scleras and irises eclipsed by the color of necromagic, Roxanne imagined she saw them flicker with recognition. The erstwhile king tilted his chin. Perhaps it was to allow the Moorfainian easier access to his exposed throat, but she could have sworn he looked at his only surviving son.

Embersnag’s lips parted. Slowly, he mouthed a single word: Run.

Roxanne took Effrax by the shoulders and wrenched him away from his crazed assault on the barrier.

“I was almost through,” he snarled, rounding on her.

“You don’t want to see this,” she whispered, reaching up to cup his face in her hands. “Don’t look at him, look at me.”

The fight flowed out of Effrax’s body, leaving him limp. Gently, she gathered him into her arms. He buried his head against her neck, and she turned to shield him from what was coming. She, however, could not look away.

With a flourish, the Moorfainian struck. His silver blade flashed as he split Embersnag’s neck. Black blood spurted from the wound. He crumpled to the ground.

And just like that, King Salix Embersnag was no more.

There was a moment of silence as the chanting ceased. Then a surge of dark energy erupted from Embersnag’s body, sucking the color out of the world around it. Black lightning forked—whether it came from the sky or the corpse, Roxanne couldn’t tell—and a shockwave blasted outwards from the epicenter of the circle.

It flattened the Moorfainians and shattered the barrier. It slammed into her and Effrax, breaking them apart, hurling them to the ground.

Coughing and wheezing, Roxanne struggled to sit up. Squinting through whirlwinds of dust, she spotted something that froze her heart. The Moorfainians had been summoning, but it was no mere daemonion they’d called.

Shädar, highest member of the Severed Six, Necrovar’s most powerful servant, had appeared. Though he hunched forward on his winged forelimbs, still he towered head and shoulders over the Moorfainian. Formidable muscles rippled beneath his dark coat of fur.

Icy fear flooded her lungs and she shuffled backward on the ground. Her futile attempt to flee attracted Shädar’s attention. His empty eyes found hers, and Roxanne was forcibly reminded of the last time she’d locked gazes with him in Necrovar’s citadel.

“Shädar has been summoned,” she whispered to her ring as the demon king advanced on her. “The coast is lost.”

CHAPTER TWENTY“A dragon always has a plan.”

~ Cylion Stellarion, Second Age

Naked and shivering, Keriya stared at the village in the valley. Aeria nestled at the edge of the Felwood, dark in the premature twilight created by Shivnath’s Mountains. Snow lined sandy walkways and frosted stone huts. A shimmering sprawl of solid ice marked Lake Sanara.

“Shivnath?” she called, though she suspected it was a lost cause. “Arisse? Is anyone listening?”

Without magic, she couldn’t transmit her plea for help. No one could hear her out here in the wilderness. She was alone and stranded. All she had was Aurelas, and that wouldn’t get her over the mountains or keep her from freezing to death.

No. Keriya had failed one too many times, and she would not, could not fail again. She had made a mistake; but by all the gods of Selaras, she vowed it would not be a fatal one.

She pushed herself upright and set off for the narrow chute that led to the Lowers’ settlement. Chill winds wrapped around the boulders and bit into her. She embraced the pain, accepting it as penance for her crime.

But really, she thought, Shivnath should’ve had the decency to let me keep my clothes.

She eased down the chute she’d ascended five years ago. The fast-descending dark made movement treacherous; she slid on scree and slipped on icy rocks. Her feet ached with cold, but the agony seemed distant, muted. Maybe this pain didn’t register on her internal scale after the t*****e of her ordeals.

At last she reached level ground. Clouds obscured the heavens, but a lone light in the Lowers’ settlement guided her through snow drifts and dead brush. She limped out of the skeletal trees and, too cold to hesitate, shouldered open the wooden door of the nearest ramshackle hut.

It was deserted. Lowers were, as the name suggested, the lowest, outcast members of Aerian society. They entered the main village at night, performing tasks the villagers did not wish to do. The Elders forced them to work in the dark, so as not to offend anyone with their presence.

Dying coals flickered in the hut’s ashy hearth. By its feeble light, Keriya found spare clothes on hooks, a pair of sheepskin boots by the door, and flint rocks on the table. She dressed quickly, wishing she had something to offer the owners. Lowers had little enough as it was, without her coming in and stealing things.

“I’ll come back,” she vowed as she left. “I’ll repay this debt.”

She would, one day. Right now, she had to leave. She needed food and water, because she was getting over those mountains. Perhaps if she proved her determination to Shivnath, the dragon god would return her magic.

She stifled those thoughts. Thinking of Shivnath made her want to howl into the night, and if the Aerians discovered her, they wouldn’t react kindly.

“Maybe not all of them,” she told Aurelas, gripping its icy hilt. “Erasmus wouldn’t turn me away. I can get provisions from him.”

Erasmus lived on the far side of town, and she didn’t want to risk entering the village. Thus, when she emerged from the Lowers’ settlement through a thorny thicket, she veered left. Kicking through crusted snow on the lake shore, she trudged north, taking the long way around Sanara. The physical exertion kept her moderately warm. Even better, it kept her mind off Shivnath.

Keriya was halfway around the lake when she heard a faint scratching noise. She froze, alert at once. The sound came again, louder this time, like claws against stone. She eased Aurelas from its scabbard, wishing it was Sethildras.

Silence reigned. She’d just dared to put another foot forward, when—

CRACK!

She stifled a gasp. It sounded like someone had wielded voltmagic. The deep, splintering noise echoed off the western mountain cliffs, reverberating and fading like distant thunder.

Keriya crouched in place, waiting. Now the only sound was the wind whispering across the crystal surface of Lake Sanara, stirring snow particles into ghostly hurricanes. Through the darkness, she spied a fissure in the ice.

In a trancelike state, she moved—not away, but onto the lake. Ice rose in miniature mountains by the shore, places where the water had fractured and refrozen, but farther out it was smooth. Smooth, except for the jagged black scar that marred the expanse.

Another shockwave hummed through the ice, rumbling up her legs. The c***k widened. Smaller lines spiderwebbed from the main one, crisscrossing on the glassy surface.

Senseless hope erupted in her. Abandoning caution, she ran toward the fissure. She slid to a slippery halt over the crossroads of fractures and dropped to her knees. Wiping snow away, she gazed into the midnight lake, her nose brushing the frozen surface.

For a long moment, nothing happened. Then a shape glimmered through the darkness, emerging from the depths.